 |
World's Population May Peak at 2070
Human population growth is likely to come to an end in the foreseeable future. A new study suggest that the world's population may peak as soon as 2070, then start to decline.
There is an 85 percent chance that the population will stop growing before 2100, a research team led by Austria scientist Wolfgang Lutz reported in the British science journal Nature, published on Thursday.
Unlike most forecasts, it does not produce just one prediction, but a range of possible futures, each with a certain probability of occurring.
There is a 60 percent probability that the world's population will not exceed 10 billion before 2100, and around a 15 percent probability that the population at the end of the century will be lower than it is today.
The population could rise from its present level of 6 billion to about 9 billion in 2070, then sink to 8.4 billion in 2100. For different regions, the date and size of the peak population will vary considerably.
By 2040, the probability of population reaching a peak becomes greater than half in China. While in sub-Saharan Africa, the probability is lower than 50 percent before 2085.
Such a prospect should cheer those worrying about food supplies and the human impact on the environment, while raising the specter of an increasingly elderly society.
As fewer babies are born and life-expectancy increases, the proportion of people over the age of 60 would have leapt from today's 10 percent to 34 percent by 2100.
In This Section
|